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At any given time, we are juggling a handful of planetary prophets: Atwood, Chomsky, Salgado. We just dropped one. The great novelist Doris Lessing, dead at 94, was a constant bright star in mankind’s greatest and most destructive era.

I’m aiming here to persuade the young to read her, so I don’t know why I even mention her great age at expiry. She was brave even before she published her first book and she kept at it, batting out fiction, memoir and reportage like a literary tennis ball machine.

Why should you read her? Lessing had a merciless eye. She studied many things, but saw the glossy surface and the grubby underside of all of them: political extremism of any stripe, upmarket social life, faux social justice, Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, a world without women, a world without men.

Lessing could tell a racketing story, could draw you into her bloodstream. A thing happens, say, a woman decides to have a fifth child and the other four say no, don’t do that, and they’re right. An old woman falls in love again, forgetting that love is the country where no one wants to live. A teenager trudges along a London street as a massive bomb explodes, and she realizes she had helped build that bomb.

She perfectly tracked and predicted our world. Lessing foresaw many of the huge dilemmas* we face now: the roaring need of women to be seen as fully human, an aging population we can’t care for, water shortages destroying civilization, the hot pot of Afghanistan and the emotional gaps that young people fill with terrorism.

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If you read her as each book came out, it felt as though humanity had a global secretary transcribing its every move. If you were a teenager, you felt you could get out of town and make something of yourself, as she did.

Women are winning the Nobel now, but the Nobel committee took so long to bend that recent winners have been too poorly to show up. Lessing was too ill to accept her prize in 2007, as Alice Munro is this year. This may be coincidence. But women grow so accustomed to being despised that they rightly come to believe that only the work matters, not the self-aggrandizing and the hunt for prizes.

Lessing came from nothing, from the back of beyond in rural Rhodesia, as Margaret Atwood explained in a Guardian obituary and love letter last week. “When the wheel spins, it's on the edges that the sparks fly.” Atwood would know about that.

I am always fascinated by how brilliance emerges in people raised in national outbacks, poor, alone, without the gift of fine schooling and the unjustified self-confidence born of money. Lessing said this was exaggerated, that she always read books, that it wasn’t so bad. But auto-didacticism cut her loose from the family she detested, the racism of southern Africa, the local alcoholism and the dry dead-bug-in-a-bottle boredom.

She shipped off to postwar London with one child in tow and sat on the social outskirts, always watching and studying. She also wrote about people not around her, science fiction being the part of her huge output that left some readers daunted, but trust me, it’s life-transporting stuff.

And then there’s this wonderful Lessing quote: “What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that ... you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”

The Golden Notebook’s fame irritates me, as it did Lessing, who said readers missed the point. Written in 1962, its second sentence read, “’As far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’”

This was true, Lessing said in 2007. “By now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture.” Again, she was prescient about core matters. I am at a loss for words. She was a seer.

*For each dilemma, read the memoirs Under My Skin, Walking in the Shade and In Pursuit of the English and the novel The Golden Notebook, the novels The Diaries of Jane Somers, Mara and Dann, the non-fiction The Wind Blows Away Our Words and the novel The Good Terrorist.

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